Building Communities – ROI Continued

As we begin to design our learning communities I search for evidence of “experts” who are building and advising on community design. As I am a visual learner I like these two graphs from Passionate – Creating Passionate Users which have relevance for community building.  Previously I have looked at ROI and found this interesting graph on Community ROI which explains that there still needs to be investment but the community will provide pretty sound ROI with additional activities which are usually beyond the original investment. 

“Think about all the things a strong user community can do for you: tech support, user training, marketing (evangelism, word of mouth), third-party add-ons, even new product ideas”……”Yes, there’s still a budget… but we’ve all seen third-party fan/user groups that got no support at all from “the mother ship” and yet thrived and gave users a level of support and training the company didn’t provide” (Creating Passionate Users).

The second image relates to user needs and I notice at the top of the hierachy is flow and engagement. From my readings and experience I would support flow and engagement being at the top of my list – we have all experienced the concept of “internet time”…..and we often wonder where has the time gone as we sit online day after day……mmm I must have been engaged or in Csikszentmihalyi moment of flow.

Csikszentmihalyi defines flow as ‘the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.’